Don't think I've ever seen a "good news" story involving Adobe... why are they still in business?

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Market inertia.

You want to get a job in publishing, animation, illustration or graphic design? You will need to know Adobe CS, because your boss will use to Adobe CS, his/her boss will have learned Adobe CS and none of them will even entertain the idea of switching because all their clients use Adobe CS.

Short of personally going round to every customer's house and pooing on the carpet Adobe will be the entrenched infrastructure of creative industry forever and all time.

That and the fact that there really isn't a worthwhile alternative. I have spent many thousands - many tens of thousands - of hours using Adobe products. Part of the inertia is that nobody who's done that wants, or frankly is in a financial position, to do so again using someone else's products. It's not really a choice. I don't have any practical option to throw out After Effects and go to Fusion because I have work to get done and a certain period of time in which to do it.

Adobe know this, and their misbehaviour is effectively unbounded. Right now there are a lot of people paying a lot of money every month, sight unseen, for possible product updates that might possibly, or might not, appear, and might, or might not, possibly be of use to them. Adobe's absolute dominance is a very serious problem, best highlighted when they went to this software-by-subscription model in the first place. I have so far managed to avoid having to move to it, but it's only a matter of time. In short the applications are brilliant but Adobe are about the most unpopular company I've ever come across among people who actually think the product is very good. And it is. Photoshop is one of the killer apps of computing in general.

But right now, Adobe can charge any price. They can make any mistake. They can impose any restriction. They can make any rule, and people will follow it. They can keep charging, and charging, and charging, and if you think about it they have not the slightest motive to ever work on the software ever again. They don't have to do anything, ever, and they get infinite money. This is not OK. This is now how commerce is supposed to work.

The ideal solution is for the open source community to get off its collective backside and produce an alternative, but that would require the the open source community to become organised, and user-focussed, and to start listening to the opinions of people who are not software engineers. And that, of course, is farce of a concept.

^ Truth. I know people who are sticking with CS6 to avoid paying over and above for software that is essentially the same.

I've whittled my subscription down to just PS, and LR (which I never use); I use PS for hours every day for concept art/illustration, but I store my files on my own hardware and have no interest in using anybody else's alternatives. Even though PS by itself is relatively cheap, it's still over £100 anually.

I honestly don't mind if it's sufficiently cheap. Something like Lightworks, for instance, which is a competent if slightly esoteric NLE, is under £8.50 a month if you go for the year option, or £250 forever. At that level, really, who cares.

But CC is not under £8.50 a month. And to add insult to several preexisting insults and very severe injuries, it's much more expensive here than it is in the USA.